Adrian Munguia

I am proudly a member of Productize-ai. Though we are pretty quiet and we had not made much noise in the past (we didn’t even have a website until recently). We are focused on developing successful commercial CV and AI products for startups as well as for some of the biggest companies in the world. We have been quite fortunate to, either as part of the company or individually, have worked on solutions to some of the world’s most complex problems.

Productize-ai’s efforts empower companies and individual who have a good product or project idea to turn it into a reality.

We have a global team of collaborators in many places, but we mostly operate out of Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. This is where I was born and was educated most of my life. From that time until today I have had the opportunity to live in many places and work for many great companies, large and small, some very successful and some not so much. In my recent past away from here I built great relationships, both personal and professional. Today I am here because I owe it to my father, the rest of my family, and to this city that taught me all I know and gave me all I have.

I truly believe in the technical capabilities here. I am one of the many highly skilled men and women trained at our poorly funded schools, which deserve my admiration and highest respect, because they form well rounded, passionate, structured, ethical, and humane human capital that make this and other industries successful and bring prosperity to many.

From within Productize-ai we have initiated a quite ambitious movement by forming the Ensenada Artificial Intelligence Group! This just happened on June 7, 2019 at my father’s house. We organized a meeting for the AI community and they showed up. Our group is working on a few issues that have been determined as critical. The main purpose of the group is to give all AI experts, students, academics and researches, and even entrepreneurs and general population that have a sincere interest (and many concerns) in AI an identity and personality to be heard and be taken into account in decisions that are important and greatly impact society.

We need to influence public policy as it relates to the development and the application of AI to us and to our collected data (from cameras in the public, toll rads, biometrics, etc.).

We must also strengthen the region’s AI community. We support local talent in developing their strategic competencies in AI and become even more competitive, better suited for industry and highly desired by companies that demand productive and ready-to-work expert human capital.

We aim at making our workforce the most sought out resource in the global AI market! Many actions will be taken to do this, one is influencing the education institutions to customize their academic programs so that graduates be ready to work side-by-side with AI in whichever embodiment AI may take. This task has positively been deemed necessary and work on it has begun. We have been invited to review a computer science program next semester. We will make observations, contributions and recommendations so that graduates would take advantage of the opportunities we have now in front of us. The rest of the academic programs need to follow this effort as they will also need to adapt as all jobs will be transformed in the immediate future.

I believe it is quite pertinent to not only adapt the engineering and computer science programs, but there must be at least one strong highly focused AI (and naturally CV) academic program in Ensenada. If not in Ensenada, then at least in the region. This AI-focused program should desirably be a strong graduate academic program whose graduates at the master or doctoral levels would hit the ground running when they start their professional careers by successfully catering to local companies as well as when working for international clients. Soon I believe we will receive the attention of some of the big players in Silicon Valley and many other places. This particular program needs to be a quite blunt in its name as it will serve to attract top prospective students from all parts of Mexico and from other countries who will compete for a chance to be trained by the top level researchers there. The name of the program, as I would recommend, needs to be: “Posgrado en Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial”.

The program must be aimed to be a multi-disciplinary one. If the program is one of the graduate computer science programs that already exists in Ensenada, and if it is willing to adapt its program, I would be of the opinion that the most natural option is Cices’e computer science graduate program to be best fit and quite confidently be considered to be the lowest hanging fruit. Cicese researchers in AI are quite strong an graduates in AI and CV from there go though quite some rigor. Work needs to be done, but the program’s quality is prime, and within their body of researchers CV and AI are well academically covered, to say the least. Some indicators may or not point exactly to where it they should for such a highly regarded center with a strong AI and CV competency, but I can say that, as a graduate, that most skills from its program are a relatively adequate fit for the US industry demands. Since my times at Cicese, the program has only increased their academic standards and it is consider quite a great program. The change would be in the name, at least to start!

Ideally, and I know life is far from ideal, we would find the main academic institutions here collaborate and align their visions to form a truly multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional graduate academic program in AI focused on attracting the top and most talented individuals in the country, and from the outside, to compete for a place in the Cicese-UABC-UNAM-Cetys-(and more) graduate program in Computer Science and AI. A program focused on creating the best and most capable talent in AI in Mexico to cater to the demands of the world’s most urgent matters to be solved in industry and academia. Graduates that are strongly sought out for their ability to adapt to business needs and align with company goals and market demands. Professionals in AI that are capable of spearheading efforts that will be new to them, as their need has never existed. Quick thinkers who have a clear view of the future possibilities and can act to avoid adverse societal consequences of AI and help remedy and correct course when they cannot be avoided. Highly scientifically regarded individuals, who have participated in some industry work or collaboration as interns in industry settings, who can use the proper technical tools for being productive, who can lead a team using highly regarded management principles, with a sense of accountability and responsibility. Also they must possess the ability to be managed easily. Ideally, a well structured and organized individual. Graduates who see the value in what they do, and can put a price on their work (in dollars or whatever currency they like!). It helps to be respectful of others, honest, truthful and responsible, as it needs to be understood that we all form part of a structure many people’s families depend on.

The graduate program’s name is quite important and fundamental. I have played many roles for companies that do great work in this field. I have interviewed many candidates for many types of positions. I have hired mostly great employees, and have fired some poor performers and have fired other people that are just hard to work with. It’s not personal, all of the decisions made at work are just business decisions.

Some of the people I have interviewed applied for positions not related with my work at all, others for similar scientist positions as mine, some to be my peers and some that I would supervise and manage.

From long and important experience I can with a high degree of confidence and excitement say that, aside from the strong academic formation of the students, a name like the one I just mentioned will undoubtedly, when applying to a top international company or even at a startup somewhere in the USA, would put their application and resume on top of the pile of candidates’ applications, and likely almost never in the paper shredder or trash bin!

If the skills learned and developed in the AI-focused graduate program deems the graduate somewhat comparable (and if the graduates are deficient in skills, the group will assess, recommend and help gain the skills), as an investment for companies, to other professionals on the job market that compete for the same opportunities, graduating from such program would almost certainly guarantee a higher initial salary. In my experience, I estimate that to be at least 15%. This is quite a great return on investment, as the investment is just a name.

Sure, this may sound like it is marketing. Well, in great part it is, and that’s a good thing! Companies use their employees for marketing quite often, and it is quite not bad at all. Companies show your work, your picture, your experience and your LinkedIn page (connect with me on Linkedin!) to attract business and investors. A program as the one I am talking about would make graduates just the right marketing tool as well, because they would likely become critical as a resource for speaking with investors and securing funds for companies. That’s not a bad place to be in at all! Actually this is quite a great experience (I’ve been there and done that!). This can perfectly form competencies in the scientists and engineers that are not only applicable, but critical to secure funds in their own companies later if in their careers that becomes their main focus.

In our first meeting I was pleasantly surprised by the group’s diverse talents and backgrounds. We had an artist, scientists, engineers, students, entrepreneurs, etc.

We are being watched and followed by many more people. As a side note, we even received an email from somebody asking if we could or knew how else could make a prosthetic limb for a dog! I guess Productize-ai needs to research that one. I’ve been asked to solve many very difficult problems in my career, but that email made go silent for a long while. Alfonso Cesena got us out of that one quite gracefully and even recommended options!

Some of the attending entrepreneurs were quite young, nonetheless eager to do good work and were truly a visionary group on how to exploit AI and gain economic benefits from this new AI era. For those entrepreneurs who are looking to build a company from within the strong community we envision, we will help them become proficient and avoid common mistakes we make when forming a business. We will help capture specialized talent that will educate and ideally certify the group in ethics, anti-corruption practices, safety, securing data in general, particularly confidential and sensitive data that may belong to clients who release the data for training AI algorithms and models with, but should be handled with much care.

Also, we will teach the group how to be responsible with their fiscal obligations, employees and be respectful of workers’ right. We will share knowledge and experience in contract clauses for securing work, contracts for hired talent, processes and procedures for just about all that is necessary, and very importantly, intellectual property matters! We will help newly built AI companies out of the group to be able to guarantee the safekeeping of their clients’ intellectual property, how not to share information and how to share it if needed to be shared. Also protecting their inventions, how not to infringe patents, how to patent their inventions, and assess the value of patenting inventions they have.

We will help them go though the process of registering brands and trademarks as well as formally establishing their businesses with responsibility.

We aim at making Ensenada and the region that includes Tijuana and Mexicali the most attractive and most convenient place to build AI software and products. We see this region as having the potential for successfully catering to the international AI industry demands. I would even stretch the idea to the extent of confessing I consider this region as potentially, in the near future, the AI capital of Mexico! A region with the capability of attracting business from Silicon Valley and other places that host companies who need AI development? The group gathered thirty motivated, trained, smart, eager to make this opportunity in AI the one we make ours, and I think we will! And we should, because somewhere else, probably in many other places, there is someone either typing or speaking something along the same lines of what I have just spent my whole Wednesday night writing about.

If you have questions or wanna chat about anything, please reach out to me or my team at your convenience. I am always working, so I will get back to you in no time!

Cheers amigos!